[sugar] Importing objects from journal

[Michael Stone]

Bert,

On Wed, Sep 26, 2007 at 12:14:50AM +0200, Bert Freudenberg wrote:
> Hi Michael,
> 
> To check my understanding I'll paraphrase - if an activity was  
> granted the P_DOCUMENT cap then it can modify existing documents in  
> the datastore, but it only ever gets access to them by explicit user  
> interaction. The P_DOCUMENT_RO cap does not require user interaction,  
> but only grants read-only access. Correct so far?

Exactly right.

> So ... P_DOCUMENT is independent from the saving of my activity  
> instance in the datastore, I assume? But for now, there is only a  
> single datastore API. Will that change?

Any activity can ask the datastore to store anything. The datastore
might refuse, due to space limits, rate-limiting, ..., etc, but no hard
restrictions are placed on "keeps". 

I don't presently have much to say about what API this should have.

> Also, does P_DOCUMENT imply I can create arbitrary datastore entries?  

P_DOCUMENT is needed for gaining write access to the "stream of history"
represented by an existing document. No special capability is needed for
making a new stream of history.

> Will the dialog support creation of new documents?

Hopefully my previous comment makes this clear?

> And P_DOCUMENT_RO restricts access to certain document types - could  
> a multi-media authoring tool request more than one type (we'd like to  
> be able to mix text/image/audio/video)? And according to the bitfrost  
> spec this conflicts with supporting streaming media, correct?

My feeling on the subject is that the P_DOCUMENT_RO API should accept a
fairly general query -- say a set of mime types, in the first pass  --
and that Rainbow will just modify the query and/or filter results as it
pleases before making them available to the requesting activity.

However, it would be good to get more feedback on this subject from
everyone involved - and particularly from Ivan. Ivan?

> Thanks - this doesn't sound unreasonable after all ;)

Music to my ears!

Michael